Manage Service Workers in Firefox and Chrome

Chrome and Firefox provide users with options to manage registered Service Workers in the browser, including options to remove Service Workers from the browser.

Service Workers are an up and coming feature supported by most modern browsers that enable sites and services to interact with the browser without having to be open in it.

Think of them as on-demand processes that enable the use of push notifications and data synchronization, or make sites work offline.

Web browsers are not designed currently to prompt users all the time when Service Workers are registered in the browser. This happens as a background process most of the time currently.

Manage Service Workers

The Service Worker is registered either automatically, or after the user accepts a prompt. Pinterest is a website that registers one automatically when the site is visited in Chrome or Firefox.

This is not made clear to the user as it happens in the background.

Chrome and Firefox offer no clear information on how to manage Service Workers that were added to the browser previously. While capabilities exist, they are more or less hidden from users at this point in time which is problematic if previously registered workers need to be removed from the browser.

This guide provides you with the means to manage workers in Firefox and Chrome.

Useful information

Origin is the page the Service Worker was registered from.

Scope refers to the pages that the Service Worker controls (accepts fetch and message events from).

Script lists the url of the Service Worker JavaScript file.

Manage Service Workers in Mozilla Firefox

Firefox users can manage all registered Service Workers in the browser in the following way:

Load about:serviceworkers in a new tab or the current tab, for instance by copying and pasting the address or bookmarking it and loading it this way.

Firefox displays all registered Service Workers on the page. Each Service Worker is listed with its origin, scope, current worker URL, cache name and other information.

Click on unregister to remove the Service Worker from Firefox, or update to request an update from its source.

Find out how to manage Service Workers in the Firefox and Google Chrome web browser, and how to turn them off.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

Publisher

Ghacks Technology News

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Comments

As a web developer with a tabletop gaming player finder website that relies on communication with it’s members, I find the idea of agents to be fascinating. It is very tantalizing.

But as an end-user it terrifies me because of the vast number of ways it can be misused. Aside from annoying pop-ups every time somebody has a notification for you, how long will it be until somebody figures out how to push an install package down the pipe to you.

I dont’t think that a preference to disable Service Workers is really needed. It’s a web standard and probably one of the most important new web standards for the next years. Firefox needs a preference because Service Workers are enabled in Firefox 44 and will be disabled in Firefox ESR 45 because of upcoming spec and implementation changes. In the long term I don’t see any reason to keep the preference.

(But it’s only my opinion and I don’t know of plans to remove the preference)

@Anonymous: You didn’t understand my comment / what service sorkers are. Service worker is *not* a synonym for notifications. Notifications are only a part and there *is* a preference to disable notifications *without* disabling the full service workers standard.

@ Sören Hentzschel – Maybe, but Service Workers are the problem for security and privacy. There is little documentation about them. They install silently in background without any notification. They run silently in background. They intercept network traffic. They can come from any website. They don’t need originating website open to be running. What’s more there are still unknown security implications. In past it was: CVE-2016-5259, CVE-2016-2812, CVE-2016-1949, CVE-2016-5287. They improve tracking and targeting. What’s more they could be even used as botnet – https://sakurity.com/blog/2016/12/10/serviceworker_botnet.html

Allowing sites to converse with your browser?? Seems a major invasion of privacy. I have yet to read what good it does for the user….Please note, I am very ignorant about most things Internet-related, which is why I come here–to learn.

When I exit from a site (a domain) it is not to have it stick to my browser session afterwards. Consequently, in conformity with Pants’ work published here at ‘Ghacks user.js Firefox privacy and security list’ :

May be useful, but not for me, thanks. A gadget IMO, not to mention privacy issues (have a look at dom.push.userAgentID : I don’t like IDs). And thanks (once again) to Martin for clarifying this service (and in no way for discrediting it).

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.